EMILY
HAU
“She reads the fine print.”
Most people in Fairfield know me for one of two things: heating oil, and reading the fine print.
The heating oil.
Five years ago I started the Nutmegger Oil Group so my neighbors could stop overpaying to heat their homes. It began with 117 households. It's now more than 900 families, and 88% of them come back every year. Nobody comes back to something that doesn't work. That's what affordability actually looks like: not a slogan — a contract, renegotiated every year, that saves real families real money.
The research.
When our town signed a speed-camera contract, I read it — the whole thing. It cited Florida law instead of Connecticut law. Residents were told the cameras ran during school hours; the town's own FAQ said they ran around the clock. Nobody in Hartford caught it. Nobody at Town Hall caught it. A resident with a library card caught it.
Hartford is full of people who vote on things they haven't read, and then send us a newsletter about it. I read the bills. I read the contracts. And when what's written doesn't match what we were told, I say so — in public, with the documents attached.
I won't promise to be the most agreeable person in the building. I'll promise to be the most practical — and the most devoted to the people I represent.
The speed-camera contract our town signed cites Florida statutes for data retention. This is Connecticut.
The Board voted on a three-year term. The signed contract says five.
Somebody has to read these things. I volunteer.
I built a sourced timeline of how Fairfield's school-zone speed cameras actually came to be.
Put together entirely from the town's own agendas, minutes, meeting videos, and contract records. Every claim links to a source you can check yourself.
A video link that jumps to the exact moment the cameras came up — from the December 2024 referral to the July 2026 debate.
§ 14-307e requires a public hearing on the plan and a vote to submit it. Both appear to be missing from the record.
The contract the Selectmen authorized “not to exceed three years”… was signed for five.
The town's promise to delete your license-plate data in 30 days sits next to a vendor contract that says 90.
The speed studies used to justify the program were run in July — with school out.
Greenwich paused its cameras this spring for the same reason Fairfield should be looking at: its public meetings didn't count as the required hearing, and the program never went to the RTM before launch. So Greenwich did it the right way — the RTM held a public hearing and voted on the specifics, as state law requires. The result? The cameras are set to come back online, running only during school hours, with $50 fines.
Doing it properly didn't kill the program. It made it legitimate. That's all any of us are asking for.
Where I stand — plainly, and in detail.
I did my homework on the issues the way I do everything else.
Affordability
Everyone running for office says the word. Here's what I did about it.
Five years ago I read my heating oil contract and did the arithmetic. The price wasn't a market price — it was whatever the company thought I'd accept. Nothing stopped neighbors from buying together except that somebody had to read the fine print and run the bid. So I did. It started with 117 families; today the Nutmegger Oil Group is more than 900 households from Stamford to Cheshire, and I renegotiate the contract every June against whoever bids.
Over four winters, measured against the price the federal government says the average Connecticut household paid, we've kept more than $1.6 million in our neighbors' pockets. This past March, when Connecticut's average hit $5.60 a gallon, our members paid $2.70.
That's not a slogan. It's a spreadsheet, and I'll show it to anyone who asks.
And it doesn't stop at oil — if we can get a better deal by organizing, we can do the same across the board.
Disclosure: The oil company pays me to run the group. It's disclosed, it comes out of their margin rather than your gallon price, and I bid the contract out every year to whoever serves the group best.
Energy costs
Connecticut families pay some of the highest energy bills in the country, and I know this market cold. We need a true all-of-the-above supply strategy — keep Millstone and treat nuclear as clean, reliable power, advance the small modular reactors the state authorized in 2025, ease the winter natural-gas crunch, and pair solar with battery storage to cut peak demand. And we need real ratepayer protection: move the “public benefits” charges off your bill and into the state budget where they're justified on the record, give solar customers a bill of rights so nobody gets scammed, and require utilities to fix gas leaks when a road is already torn up.
Housing & local control
I want more housing — near the transit and infrastructure we already have — but built with communities, not imposed by one-size-fits-all mandates from Hartford. It should start with real data on what housing is actually needed, and where. Fix 8-30g's broken definition of “affordable” so towns get credit for housing that genuinely is affordable, and tackle the real cost drivers keeping people out: property taxes, permitting costs, and sky-high energy bills. I'm tired of politicians writing policy like they're pushing a website live just to see what breaks — maybe this will work, whoops, no, let's experiment a little more. It isn't a simulation. Real people, real consequences.
Schools & kids
Fully fund the Education Cost Sharing formula and index it to inflation so towns aren't stuck filling the gap with property taxes. Get K-3 literacy right with evidence-based, phonics-driven reading and real funding for reading specialists — and less time on Chromebooks. Protect special-education students, an area close to both my heart and my research, and expand vocational-technical education and community college so a four-year degree isn't the only path to a good career.
Environment & open space
Protect our open space and tree canopy — a mature tree is one of the cheapest flood defenses we have. I support a three-for-one replacement standard for any tree removed, and I'm currently working with a Yale Data Science Fellow and Yale School of the Environment faculty to actually measure how much flooding we can expect as we pave over open ground. Real climate solutions, yes — but ones we can afford and actually deliver.
Getting around
Faster, more reliable Metro-North isn't just convenience — it grows our tax base and pulls cars off I-95. Fix the gap where the state funds road projects but can't deliver them, thanks to weak oversight and slow contracting, and protect the Special Transportation Fund by making heavier EVs pay their fair share for the roads they use.
Health care
Keep private equity from running our hospitals into the ground, and streamline the Certificate of Need process. Raise the Medicaid reimbursement rates that have been underfunded for two decades, invest in urgent, primary, and hospice care outside the hospital, and let small businesses pool together through association health plans for more affordable coverage.
Taxes & spending
The fiscal guardrails have helped Connecticut pay down crushing pension debt and earn credit-rating upgrades — I'd protect that discipline. But I'm pragmatic, not rigid: I'm open to fairer, more modern tax models and real tax relief for middle-class families, and I'll oppose quietly weakening the caps just to unlock more spending with nothing to show taxpayers for it.
Accountability & reform
I've spent years filing the public-records requests that drag problems into daylight; in Hartford I'd write the rules instead of fighting them from the outside. I'll push for easier ballot access, a stronger Citizens' Election Program so newcomers can run without a built-in donor network, closing the loopholes that keep public business hidden, and giving voters a more direct say.
Homeschooling & parent-directed education
Connecticut families have a fundamental right to direct their children's education, and the state has a real duty to protect children from harm. Those two things aren't in conflict, and good policy shouldn't pretend they are.
Public Act 26-37 asks every family to file an annual form on how their child is educated, and it requires a DCF check when a family withdraws a child to begin homeschooling. I support keeping children safe. My concern is narrow and specific: the law permanently bars a family from homeschooling if a parent appears on the state's child abuse and neglect registry — a listing an agency makes on a “reasonable cause to believe” standard, not a finding made by a court — and the recourse it offers a family placed under that bar is minimal.
A permanent restriction on a constitutional right should rest on more than an administrative finding, and every family subject to one deserves a real, workable appeal.
The way this passed should also give people pause, wherever they land on the policy itself. Public opposition ran heavily against the bill, and it advanced out of committee only after recorded “no” votes were changed during the voting window. Residents who take the time to show up deserve to be heard, not overridden.
I'd protect children through fair process: judicial findings rather than registry listings as the basis for restricting a family's rights, and a clear appeal for any parent told they may not educate their own child. That's a standard that keeps kids safe and treats families fairly at the same time.
I've been documenting this town's decisions in public, one record at a time.
Everything below ran in Patch, under my name, before I was a candidate. Nobody has disputed a fact in any of it.
How Fairfield's zoning decisions actually got made.
Eight pieces built from the town's own agendas, minutes, and meeting video. The TPZ Vice Chairman responded to the series and did not dispute a single point.
Bringing people together to solve problems too big for any one person.
Emily Hau is the Republican candidate for State Representative in Connecticut's 132nd District — Fairfield and Southport.
The clearest picture of how I work is right here in Fairfield. The Nutmegger Oil Group now brings together more than 900 families, and by pooling our purchasing power we've kept over $1.6 million in local pockets over four winters. It's a small idea with a big lesson, and it's the whole reason I'm running: when people cooperate instead of going it alone, ordinary families win real savings against rising costs.
I've spent two decades at Yale University, recruited into three of its research organizations with growing responsibility at each. I started at the Yale Child Study Center, where I developed a lasting research interest in autism and special education; I went on to direct programs and partnerships at the Yale Institute for Network Science; and today I run the day-to-day operations of the Yale Institute for Foundations of Data Science — one of the university's top research and funding priorities — where I convene collaborators as varied as Google Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Boston Red Sox. With graduate training at Columbia and Yale, I'm especially good at winning grants and building programs that fund themselves through partnerships — exactly the kind of resourcefulness a representative should bring home to the district. My interest in autism and special education also led me to co-found the Give Speech Foundation, an earlier nonprofit effort to make communication technology more accessible for people who can't speak.
My approach to Hartford is plain: be optimistic, be cooperative, work across the aisle, and always put Fairfield first. And I make one promise I mean literally — I'll read the bills. No autopilot, no partisan reflex, no rubber-stamping legislation nobody's examined. Just careful, independent judgment on behalf of the people I represent.
A Fairfield resident since 2015, I live in the district with my husband, William, and our two daughters.
BA in Geography, Ohio Wesleyan University · International business law study in Paris · Postgraduate fellowship in developmental social neuroscience, Yale School of Medicine · Graduate study in fundraising management, Columbia University.
You don't have to like everything about me.
You just have to ask yourself one question: when the next bill crosses a desk in Hartford, who do you want reading it?
Paper beats noise. Every time.